[Pkg-fonts-devel] RFC: Planning an Intial Font Policy (was: Re: [Pkg-fonts-bugs] ITP: ttf-sil-gentium-plus: extended Unicode smart font family for Latin/Greek/Cyrillic)

Paul Wise pabs at debian.org
Wed Nov 10 04:12:54 UTC 2010


2010/11/10 Rogério Brito <rbrito at ime.usp.br>:

> What about us writing an initial proposal for a font policy, formalizing
> what we have done so far, and where we want to get?

Sounds good.

We should take a look at the Fedora fonts policy:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts_packaging_policy

> * Should we compile the fonts from the sources by default, whenever they
>  have their sources available, under normal circumstances?

In certain circumstances the license may prevent this (SIL OFL +
reserved font name). I think we should encourage building but document
that particular caveat (and any others that arise).

>  If we do build them, what format should we preferrably build? TTF? OTF?
>  Both? If we ship both versions, how do we differentiate between then
>  during runtime (say, for fontconfig or to display that information to the
>  users)?

Probably just OTF? Are there any advantages to TTF?

> * How should we name the source packages? In an agnostic way (since the
>  implementation may change or not be unique)? What about binary packages?
>  Should they be named after the types of the fonts?

Maybe the Fedora one, with s/-fonts$/^font-/?

# Fedora font packages are named
[foundryname-]projectname[-fontfamilyname]-fonts, in lowercase.

Generally name the source package the same as the binary package and
ask upstream to name their tarballs like that.

I wonder if the font- prefix needs to be plural when appropriate or not.

I don't think the format needs to be included in the package name,
since some packages will include both.

We need to keep in mind the TeX fonts stuff and talk with that Debian
team about the fonts policy.

>  Should we actually hae any standard at all for naming the packages,
>  leaving only guidelines to the packagers?

I think yes.

>  If we decide to name the packages in a particular way, how do we properly
>  encode the name of the fonts? What about the vendor? What about the
>  foundry? What about fonts that were made collectively? What about
>  typefaces that are in the public domain with no easy way to trace the
>  original designer?

My vote goes for the Fedora scheme with a fonts-/font- prefix.

>  How should we name the packages of fonts like, say, a font comissioned by
>  Microsoft, published by the Free Software Foundation and actually drawn by
>  Vincent Van Gogh, under, say, the OFL 1.1? And what about (since the OFL
>  1.1 allows) to make a derivative work? Who should be kept in the names,
>  and who should not?

In the modified Fedora scheme, this would be font-someproject or maybe
font-fsf-someproject.

>  What about the Karl Berry Naming Scheme?

That seems to be mainly for old filesystems with character limits
(FAT16/DOS). I don't think such systems are very relevant to Debian.

> * Where should we install the fonts?
>
>  * /usr/share/fonts/$format/$foundry-$name/$filename?
>  * /usr/share/fonts/$format/$foundry/$name/$filename?
>  * /usr/share/fonts/$format/$format-$foundry-$name/$filename?

The bikeshed shall be painted /usr/share/fonts/$format/$package/$filename

> * In the package long descriptions, what about adding some metadata to the
>  long descriptions so that the user knows if a given font has serifs or
>  not? If it gives us an italic shape? If it gives us a bold weight? Demi
>  bold? Light? Extra light? Oblique?

Sounds reasonable as long as the information is short.

>  What about if the font has support for some uncommon OpenType feature (or
>  any cool feature of whatever advanced feature that our format-du-jour
>  happens to have)?

Sounds reasonable as long as the information is short.

> * How about reporting the scripts that the fonts are supposed to contain?
>
>  Some of the information that we include in the long descriptions could, in
>  principle, be automatically fed to debtags to make searching for fonts
>  easier.

I think we need to add such information to app-install-data (or create
font-install-data) so that PackageKit and the like can automatically
install appropriate fonts and users can search available fonts based
on this metadata. Fedora has already done this and stores the
information in the equivalent of Packages files IIRC. I don't think we
should bloat the Packages files though. We could probably add
generation of this to the pkg-fonts debfontreview script. We need to
talk to the maintainers of PackageKit, aptitude, synaptic, etc to see
what features they would consider appropriate. Obviously we would
likely want the autoinstall stuff that Fedora has.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise



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